Many of them seem to agree with the notion that, indeed, you can’t force art.

Can’t do it. Can’t force art, creativity, innovation, invention.

To which I say a strongly-worded:

POPPYCOCK!

BALDERDASH.

HORSESHIT IN A 7-11 64 OUNCE THIRST ABORTER SODA CUP.

I’ll posit that not only can you force art, but you in fact must force art.

Because art is not a magical power. Art is a result. It is a consequence of our actions, and the very nature of an action is that it is something we forced ourselves to do.

(One wonders if this is where the notion of a hack comes from. I quite like that verb, actually — to hack. Hacking through underbrush. Hacking apart a chair. Hacking up a hairball!)

Now, this phrase, this notion, this bewildering admonishment — “you can’t force art” — seems to share two possible meanings depending on the intent of the phrase-utterer.

The one utterance seems to mean, “Well, of course you make art, but when it feels like you’re really forcing it — you know, like, trying to cram a shoe into a pasta-maker or a goat into an elephant or a barrel cactus up your own ass — then you’re not likely to create art at all.”

The apparent definition of the second utterance is a far less reasonable: “ART JUST HAPPENS. We are all connected by a mystical muse-based frequency and sometimes the metal fillings in our teeth tune us into that radio station of raw inspiration and that’s how art happens — we are giant open orifices waiting for the voodoo ejaculation of the Muse’s artfulseed.”

Let’s tackle each of these in turn.

The first notion makes sense. It sounds right. Every author and surely every artist hits a point during the act of creation where it feels like the torch is guttering. The campfire’s gone darkfor the night. So, you think, “I could just quit for the day. Go have a Pepsi and some animal crackers and watch some TV, wash some dishes, masturbate to the 2014 Ikea catalog (nggh Gronkulla!), go to bed and recharge these here art batteries.” And this is generally sensible because obviously you have to quit the day’s work at some point. Working for 12 hours straight on a single thing may lead to art, but it’s just as likely it’ll lead to you inking a baffling manifesto on your skin in your own waste (“MY BODY IS THE TEXT BEHOLD MY SKINRIDER’S EPIPHANY”).

But there’s also a thing that happens where you might, using this reasonable-sounding excuse of not forcing it, quit your day a bit early. Before your minimum efforts are even complete. Example: just the other day I was crawling through my word count the way a starving man crawls through a muddy ditch to get to a Dorito he imagined at the end. It was just a boggy fucking slog. Most days for me are a fairly nice clip to 2000 words, and then the next 1000 take more time and require more teeth-gritting and sphincter-clenching, but this day just felt like I was trapped, like each sentence written was the drag of a rusty cheese grater across my wrist to free the hand pinned underneath a fallen soda machine.

I got to 1500 hundred words and I said, FUCK THIS NOISE, then I may have yelled YOLO and violently cleared everything off the top of my desk. And the thought that went through my head was, basically, don’t force it. The other days have been good. Ease off the stick, Earnhardt, Jr, tomorrow will be better. The story will be waiting.

But also this little pokey pointy stick kept jabbing my brain-kitten, thus making said kitten hiss and spit. So I stopped and said, okay, I always always always get my 2000 words — it’s a point of fucking pride here so I’ll squeeze the blood from this brick and see if I can’t wring out another fuck-smeared shit-box full of a likely-worthless 500 words. Words I figured I’d throw away.

And I did it. Miserably. Five hundred words is usually easy for me to write (this post is already over that). This felt like proctology with a pair of soup ladles.

I knew I’d probably scrap those words.

But I went back and read them. And you know what?

They don’t read like they were the result of exploratory rectal surgery.

They don’t read as if they were the peed-out kidney stones they felt like at the time.

They are, in fact, pretty damn solid.

As solid — if not moreso — than the words that seemed to fall out of me on “good” writing days.

I forced it. It hurt. And yet, those words still work.

Now, to the second idea, that art is a lightbulb in our heads connected to a switch that we do not control, well. You can probably guess my response. It probably involves the word “poop” and “noise” placed adjacent to one another and possibly yelled whilst flailing.

What happens in the dark of your mind — that sudden surge of inspiration! — is not actually art in the same way that a struck match is not actually a bonfire. You have to do something with it. You have to have agency. You must claim a course of action. You gotta throw the match, motherfucker. Creativity is worthless without the act of creation that follows it: otherwise all you’re doing is daydreaming into the void, giving a gift of inspiration to whatever mad elder gods roil and coil in the deepest darkest basket of far-flung ultradimensional space.

Art doesn’t just happen.

Art is made.

We are makers! We are doers!

So go make! Go do!

Embrace the desire to create. Give life and love and opportunity to the ephemeral shapes and shadows your imagination has gifted to your mind.

Art is surgery. It is extracting the phantoms of your imagination and packing them with meat and bone and blood so that they get up from the slab that is the screen of your word processor or your notebook — or your canvas or your stage or your camera lens.

You can’t force art?

Bullshit. Can too.

Sometimes, you gotta.

If you think that makes me a hack and not an artist, fuck it. I’m a hack.

But I’m a hack who’s making art, and you’re just an artist who can’t hack it.

*drops mic*

*is trampled by a startled elephant with a goat hanging out of its butt*

(More wallpapers below:)

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119 Comments

Thank you.
Since becoming a mother and a published author I have found that I very much have to force the writing. The ideas may come while my child is screaming and needs me, and they may flee when I finally get the chance to sit at my computer, and I may completely suck at getting anything like 2000 words out of me a day, but I still write in the times I have – which is mostly after lunch when my brain tells me I should take a cerebral break and scive off. I owe it to myself. I owe it to my readers (which may only be in the double-digits, but they still count, dammit!
I, too, am a hack. And damn proud of it.

Have a hard time picturing Raphael or Michelangelo (or any other ninja turtles for that matter) being like, “Nah, ain’t feeling it today.” Wouldn’t the result be Mr. Patron paying the bills, supporting them like, “GTFO! You’re FIRED!” — Renaissance Donald Trump.

–“Dude, you can either carve pretty reliefs into the side of this 50-ton block of granite, or you can lug it up that hill and put it in place ontop of the thousand other 50-ton blocks of granite. Your choice.”
–“Yeah, think I’ll go with carving pretty pictures.”

There was a time, not so long ago, when artistry and competency in your craft weren’t separate ideas. Middle-aged masons. Carpenters. I mean, look at Athens. At Rome. They weren’t just constructing buildings, they were building freakin’ masterpieces.

Yes artists have to freaking do work…words don’t write themselves down…paint doesn’t crawl onto the canvas…good designs don’t just show up on the page…stone doesn’t sculpt itself. You’re confusing art with craft. Every human being is creative, but being creative doesn’t make one an artist. Historically, very few people who worked in anything resembling a craft would have been considered artists (including writers). That’s because it was assumed (often rightly) that most of them were working to a known pattern. Almost anyone can learn to work to pattern…ie concoct a story and then hammer it out. With perseverance and luck they’ll find a publisher/readers who need/want that sort of story. Does that mean the story is art? No. What makes something art? It varies depending on who you talk to, but generally speaking it’s not crap you “force out”. It has to come from the heart. Artists who force themselves to push (whatever medium they work in) end up causing damage to themselves. If this makes no sense to you then I respectively suggest you are not an artist. Real art is not something you can think up and then push out. It’s like a baby. There is always a gestation period…periods of growth that can’t be viewed by anyone (including the artist). It may suddenly appear, but it has been forming over time…sometimes for years. If you think of yourself as a hack (whether you are an artist or not) then that’s probably what you’ve become and what you’re pushing out isn’t art.

If art is gestation that it stands to reason that the birth is often hard and painful. Ask a woman in labour if she wants to stop, she probably does. But she still has to keep pushing or the baby will never appear and maybe the baby and mother will both die.

Art dies if you don’t sometimes push and force it into the world. Some of the greatest artists -certainly better than I – struggled and forced and pushed for their work to appear.

I think you’re missing the point. He’s not saying that you should write lazy, contrived words just for the sake of writing. He’s saying that “you can’t force art” is just an excuse that people use to cop out of getting their work done when they’re not in the mood. He’s saying what he always says: that you can’t sit around and wait for the magical gods of writing to gift you with “inspiration” just because you’re having a bad day. Sometimes, you have to hunker down and push that stuff out.

I think you also missed the part where he clearly said that the words he was “forcing” out weren’t bad at all, and were sometimes even better than what he wrote on good days. The point is that forcing yourself to write and actually get the job done doesn’t always result in a mediocre or inferior product. Also, what gives you the right to decide what is and isn’t art? What gives anyone that right? There are people who consider anything to be art, even things that aren’t necessarily good, and there are people who only think that products that are “deep” or “meaningful” should be considered art. It’s not a definable term, which makes the whole “you can’t force art” argument essentially meaningless.

I once would have struggled to produce work every day, but now that I do – looking back from years of writing every day – it’s easier, because I’ve established a routine. So in that sense, I’m lucky. I can (usually) work through the low motivation days because I have a lot of momentum I guess

This struck a chord – I spend far too much time writing ‘when I’m in the mood’ instead of getting into a daily routine. And it’s far too easy to fill available writing time with other stuff… I am going to print out and stick somewhere prominent ‘the thing that defines a writer is that the writer writes.’ Chuck – you’ve just become my motivational tool.

Some of my best stuff comes when I’m forcing myself to break through the wall and crank another few hundred words. The story often goes in weird directions then, and some of them end up being keepers. Thing is, even when they don’t, the next day it’s easier to back up and go in the right direction.

Seriously, Chuck, the elephant/goat combo? Now I have a five-minute window to find a brain-bleach drug to prevent long-term memory formation, or that image will haunt my dreams 😉

I agree that you can force it and in fact, some of my best work has come when I have forced it.

Now what I’m going to say next has to be carefully worded as in general I believe in forcing it and I don’t like ‘but I’m a speshul snoflayke who doesn’t have to BECAUSE’

But when you have severe depression and anxiety the very parameters of forcing it changes. During good phases forcing it means doing my 1000-2000 words no matter what. But on bad days forcing it can mean 10 words or two paragraphs of editing, and any more than that really is not possible for me.

I imagine the same applies for anyone with a chronic illness that frequently leaves them empty and exhausted just by getting out of bed.

Force your art. Force it. But sometimes forcing it will not be a dramatic thing and will, in fact, just be the process of doing anything.

That is absolutely true. Anxiety and depression aren’t helped by, erm, trying to shove the goat into the elephant — it’s very important to deal with the illness before you try to deal with tackling any sort of artistic obstacles.

I see it very much as self-care. If forcing it will cause a depressive episode or a panic attack, I do what is easy and figure that at least I am doing. If forcing it will keep the sucking chest-wound closed for a little longer I do it.

Generally writing is the *thing* that has kept me together even during the bad times, even though I often find what I write is sparse and weak and poor.

I guess what it is is that I am generally very in favour of ‘you;ve got to do it’ and ‘force it if necessary’ advice but I am also very sympathetic to the plights of those people who through no faults of their own can only do very limited work at the moment. I feel they need, perhaps, a ladder hammered into the cliff. And that ladder being the simple sentence ‘any amount of writing is still writing’.

Oh, btw, I wanted to deliver a thank you, Chuck. I recently had my first ‘yes’ back from a magazine and I couldn’t have done it without your advice and all the hours I spent writing.

Validation and inspiration; thank you, Anninyn! My mental image of depression (what my doc calls major depressive disorder) is of trying to walk through some substance thicker than water. On good days, it’s set gelatin. On bad days, it’s a very large brick of putty.

Chuck, thanks to you also for redefining my view of the process of art creation. If you have any special advice for how to have Jell-O days more often, please share it. 🙂

You can always ‘force’ things: Square pegs into round holes with a big enough hammer, my fat ass into those size 32 swim trunks…. It can be painful. Things can get broken. It may not look very pretty in the end. It may not be remotely close to what you wanted. But you can always force it. When getting the ‘results’ is more important than anything else, forcing it is sometimes just what you have to do. Wait! Other things are important too? Maybe we just need a bigger hammer….. Sometimes making art simply means having a big enough hammer. Pity the ‘artists’ out there whose hammers are all too small……

I’ll admit that, as a noob, I was somewhat a follower of the weak (arsthropic?) principle, here: if you force it, you’ll get words, but it won’t be “art”.
However, you have certainly made me confront those times where I’ve actually put on the extra pot of coffee and written words in defiance of this principle.
It’s true, you get words; sometimes they are “art” sometimes not. Just like any other time.
Going back to a piece after a while, I cannot tell the difference between the words I wrote when they were easy or when forced.

Absolutely. Even, as Chuck said, the next day. I think Stephen King said something very similar in On Writing. That the writer, while working on something, can’t tell whether it’s horseshit or not. So keep plugging and get it out. Decide later whether it was worthwhile. It’s surprising how often it is.

I’ll limit my opinion to writing, since it’s the only kind of art I even pretend to know how to make, but that said, for me it’s very simple: when I force it, most of the time what comes out isn’t worth keeping. But when I don’t force it, there’s no output for keeping it to even be an option.

My thought exactly. Literally exactly. These were precisely the two examples I thought of. When Dickens wrote his serialised novels he was working to order, to deadline and to keep food on the table, yet somehow managed to produce art. Same for Shakespeare, except he didn’t even have the order to keep him warm. I think you can even argue that they produced art BECAUSE of the forcing, of the need. If writing is all that is keeping the wolf from the door, you do a shitload more writing than if you are just faffing about for fun. And we all know what practice makes us, don’t we? Also, as an old copywriter, I know for a fact, over and over again, that magic is just as likely to come from the bleed-on-the-keyboard-to-get-it-done times as it is from the look-at-the-words-fly-from-my-fingers times.

Can we add in that word count is personal to each artist/writer? There seems to be a belief that real writers are prolific and can produce somewhere between 2000 and six kajillion words a day. Art is done in pieces. It doesn’t matter if it’s a paragraph, 2000 words, one eyeball carved into the granite, or if it took three weeks to get that goat up the elephant’s ass. Every artist is different and has their own norm. In this case, size doesn’t matter…though the elephant might…and the goat cause…ewwwwwww. *borrows some of Paul’s brain-bleach*

On the one hand:
“I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at 9 am every morning.” – Peter DeVries

But by the same token:
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
—William S. Burroughs

That sounds about right to me. When you quit wasting time “finding your voice” and self-censoring and checking the mailbox and watching the Weather Channel and making microwave nachos from Funions and cheese and instead just sit down and write, it’s easy to do 2k words in 2 hours. FWIW, that’s a rate of only 17 words per minute. C’mon, I bet you txt faster than that while doing 50 through the school zone….

It’s always fun if you’re the sort who enjoys passing mental kidney stones to get the words just right. 🙂

Three things:

#1. People who edit hard as they write the first draft will take longer to reach their “final” 2,000 words. (I used to write that way–I’m a book editor by profession–but after nine books of my own and too many magazine articles published, all under deadline, I found a better way. See point #3.) But I bet those first draft edit/writers process 2,000 words and more in that first two hours.

#2. The more you write, the easier it is to be in the zone. The writing itself isn’t easier, but with experience, you’ll enter that focused active-writing mind (and stay there) with less foreplay.

#3. Write your 2,000 words. But more important–write your idea. Get it down. You can always go back and wordsmith it, finesse it, even expand it. Focus on the hard nut of what you want someone–anyone–else to understand, and when you finally come up for air don’t be surprised if you have 4,000 or 8,000 words.

I take a lot of offense to this “muse” bullshit that makes writers and artists into some possessed channel with a Ouija board to create. You’re an artist because the world inside you is different and rare. Bring it to life, and don’t depend on some fucking mythical broad to tell you what to make with your Crafty Crafterton hands. Make the world you want to see to show everyone that it can be done.

Also, waiting for your muse to show up is an excuse to be fucking lazy and not make her appear. No other job allows you to wait for inspiration to strike in order to complete said job. Screw the muse, make one up.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Wendig candy bar wrappers to tie together and make a dress out of.

When your creative roots are in the creative industry, you live by this just-do-it mentality. And yet, outside of that pressured environment (despite the industry’s continued success), artists so often live my a waiting-for-the-muse mentality. So disappointing.

I hate the “muse” crap, I hate the “aspiring” crap, I hate the preciousness some people assign to writing. It’s a job — a pretty fucking wonderful job — but still a job. I have a quote taped to my monitor from Peter de Vries. “I write when I’m inspired and I see to it that I’m inspired at 9:00 every morning.” That’s how you write. You tell ’em, Chuck.

Lovely sentiments like this containing words like “poop” and images of goats hanging out the back end of elephants help me to see that what I am doing as a writer makes absolutely no sense at all. Making word art on my laptop when I should be doing something useful like unplugging the toilet makes no economic, practical, or sociological sense in any way that I can see. I write novels that no one reads, a practice I learned to do quite well as a middle school English teacher since the Eighties. I write stuff that could never really happen, making jokes that no one laughs at, and extolling pie-in-the-sky themes. I must be insane to sit down and continue to force the words to flow down the irrigation channels of my spell-correcting mind. Why should I force out the art? Well, the middle school English teacher thing is probably the reason. You can see the connection between that and insanity, can’t you?

Cancer and chemo can make some people just give up on everything until they get well. As a writer, I wrote. Sometimes I didn’t, and still don’t, know what those words meant. I know I was hallucinating a lot of the time, but writing was a comfort. Pen to paper and later fingers to computer, it was familiar, a normal part of life and got me through many dark and painful times. I think this “can’t force art” is right there with writer’s block. When I have a deadline and a check waiting when I meet that deadline and I need that check to eat and pay my light bill, I have no problems with writer’s block. It’s writer or bbq that goat.

I spent about 40 years (well,maybe not quite. I don’t think I learned to write until I was about 6) working on the “I have to wait for inspiration” approach. That combined with “I need a big stretch of uninterrupted time to write” absurdity. Only within the last ten years has it slowly dawned on me that inspiration doesn’t strike if you aren’t already writing. And only in the last year have I managed to make writing a daily practice, thus giving me some chance that the goat in the elephant will be art, or at least something worth sharing.

Funny, when I’ve had non-fiction writing jobs (which still require putting words together from nothing) I’ve never had an issue with the idea that I just sit down and make them happen. On schedule.

Your creating requires inspiration? Fine. Then part of your responsibility as a creator is to stay inspired. It’s part of your work. Feed the muse! Experiment in your art. Experiment in unrelated art. Experience life. Do something new. Cook. Bake. Remind yourself to see and not just look. Listen carefully. Pay attention.

Hemingway compared writing to withdrawing from a well, and advised stopping for the day before the well was empty. Your job as an artist is to do the things when you are NOT writing to make sure that the well has recharged before you next sit down to write.

I just came from a convention where “hack” has the opposite connotation. Where being able to hack is a status symbol. And where a speaker told us that in order to think outside the box, you have to gain depth and breadth of knowledge. The convention was DEFCON, and the art form is computer hacking. It doesn’t matter what the medium, whether I’m writing or messing with computers, I’m hacking. I’m taking the tools available to me and making something in a new way and possibly in a way that was never intended. In order to do that, I have to become skilled. And the only way to gain skill is to do. I find it interesting that when it comes to wordsmithing, being a hack is supposedly bad; when it comes to computers it’s good. But really, there is no difference.

Well thanks for this kick in the ass, Chuck! Today is one of those days for me. You know, the slogging through the bog of filth and slime. I’m near the end of my story and every word feels like I’m chopping off an appendage. I was going to stop for the day and hope tomorrow would work out better. But now I shall stop procrastinating and just damn well do it. Because writers write. And dammit I’m a writer. *glares at self* Hear that? *stomps off to write*

You can love writing all you want, but if you want to make a career out of it at some point you’re going to have muscle through something even when you don’t want to. Kind of part of ANY and ALL jobs. Just because yours is artistic by nature doesn’t make it any easier.

/end ramble-rant-thing

Love your posts as always. They give me the no bullshit answers I need to hear more often than not.

Totally agree. Forcing sucks butt-chunks but it’s necessary. And it still produces good work (sometimes. Sometimes it produces shit work with little crap-jewels hidden inside it. You still have to do it either way).

Just one little addition that I learned the hard way: try to be a LITTLE gentle about it. By this I don’t mean let yourself off the hook; I just mean that sometimes our reluctant lazy selves need some encouragement as well as flagellation. Like, a LOVING drag of a rusty cheese grater across your wrist to free the hand pinned underneath a fallen soda machine.

Sometimes I think people say that, too, when they want to keep other people from making art. “I’m an Artist, and if it you have to force it then you’re not. That makes me Special.” Related to #2, but a bit different still.

As a culture we focus a lot on talent, and not a lot on hard work. We tell our kids they do well because they’re smart or creative but, while that may be true, we often say so at the expense of emphasizing effort. I know that’s one of my personal problems – moreso with other things (recently, specifically, learning how to play instruments) than with writing, but still overall it’s a theme for me, I would say. I also think that people tend to think of obstacles as being discouraging, when they often don’t have to be.

I guess I must be a tortured genius or something because I really can’t force my writing. There are times when I sit down to write an email and 20 minutes later there is a 1500 word short story where the email was supposed to be, but there are other times, much more common other times, where I sit down to write and 8 hours later I have nothing.

And then the next day I sit there for 8 hours and I have nothing. And then a year later, after sitting there day after day after day after day and getting nothing, I sit down to write an email and there’s a story there, and then suddenly I can write and write and write and write for months at a time. So maybe the rest of you guys can force it, but I honestly can’t.

That doesn’t make me feel superior to or more of an artist than all the writers out there that are constantly churning out work. It just means that when I have writers block I REALLY have writers block. And when I don’t, I can write several 2000 word stories a day. I just have to tap into the inspiration when it’s there, because the rest of the time I search and search for it but nothing happens

I’m not ‘comfortable’ with it. I just haven’t found any other way to write. Maybe if I was like a lot of other people here and getting paid to write stuff I’d be able to work in a different way, but I’m not. So instead I sit at my computer all day every day, staring at the blank page with the cursor in the corner, and my mind is completely blank. And then one day I’ll have a flood of stuff pour from the ends of my fingers and into the keyboard that I’m completely unprepared for, and then the dam is broken for a while again.

On the whole though, I’d prefer to be able to churn out a couple of thousand words every day instead of having a week or so every year where I churn out a couple of hundred thousand words and then have nothing left 🙁

The worry is, you’re unlikely to ever get paid to write stuff unless you can find a way through this. I don’t know you and so please excuse the potential hasty judgment but it is worth considering whether or not this is a mental health issue rather than a writer’s block issue. Some writers are anxious or suffer from manic-depression and try to approach writing in a more traditional work-till-its-done way and they’re ultimately treating a symptom rather than the problem.

The good news is that to the best of my knowledge there are no mental health issues. I just have a weird way of writing where I have periods of 1-5 years where I write like crazy, immediately followed by periods where I can’t write anything at all for 1-3 years. It’s cyclical, and I can’t explain it, but that’s just the only way it works for me…

As for not getting paid to write, I’ve managed to get one book self published and made almost double the money it cost to publish it in sales, and I figure that any future books are going to go the same way. I don’t write for money, I write because, in the periods where I CAN write, I HAVE TO write, because I just have so many things that I need to get out of my head and onto the page.

Which when I put it like that does sound a little like mental illness I suppose, but in reality I think all writers are slightly unsound 🙂

Kaal Alexander Rosser
August 7, 2013 @
1:35 AM

I think this might be where we diverge in outlook: in your comment, at one point, you speak of “getting nothing” to write.
I’m sorry to say that neither do I. Ever. I make the words, I don’t get given them. They are mine! I made them! 🙂
(Not precious about my writing, honest!)
Seriously, though, I know what you mean when it feels like you are just “getting” the words from somewhere, but that’s what I refer to as the easy times; it’s the hard, forced writing when that internal spigot is jammed in the off position and you have to think: “OK, so I’ve got ‘The’. What is the next word?”
THAT’S when it’s forced, and THAT’S when it feels like every word is going to be a steaming pile of hotspur, but it really isn’t.
When you look back at the work, later, you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Sorry, went on a bit, there. I just offer these thoughts in the hope that it helps you overcome your block.

I’ve had numerous conversations with people who tell me all I have to do to get over my writers block is write. Write something, write anything, they say, and things will start to flow again. What NOBODY seems to understand is that when I say I can’t write I literally mean I CANNOT write.

I am unable to write ANYTHING. I sit at my computer and I try to force the issue, I try to squeeze out a sentence, and then move on to squeezing out another sentence. But in my case it’s not that I can only push out bad sentences, it’s that I can’t even manage a single sentence.

I’ve tried writing exercises, and lots of different gimmicks and tricks that work for 99% of writers out there, but it just doesn’t work for me. Of course, the ultimate irony is that I can write in detail about how I’m unable to write, so I even tried writing a short story based on being unable to write, and lo and behold my brain completely froze and nothing came out.

So unfortunately I’m doomed to sitting here staring at a blank screen until my muse comes back from the bender she’s been on for the last year or so…

Damien, based on your posts here, I can’t help but wonder if your expectations are the trouble. Lots of people freeze when they sit down to write the next world-changing blockbuster, but no one ever seems to have a problem composing yet another pointless text message or email. So follow your own pattern on this–don’t sit down to write something “important,” just tap out an email, and see if those inadvertent short stories don’t keep flowing.

Will, you’d be amazed how many times I’ve sat down to write an email over the years and a short story has appeared. I think my whole point with my initial comment was that while most people CAN force words out on the bad days, that just doesn’t work for me. I literally CAN’T force my writing. It’s either there or it isn’t, and nothing I try to do to change that works.

I’ve also been kind of hoping that one of my long replies on this thread will suddenly morph into a story, but no luck so far. I guess I’m never going to be the new Terry Pratchett or Stephen King when it comes to churning out bestsellers, but that’s okay as things are good in every other area of my life 😀